The Fifth Sacred Thing (72 page)

“We don’t—we didn’t. We didn’t want to starve people in order to support it,” Madrone said.

“Never bothered anyone around these parts,” Rafe said. “And a lot of good it done you now.”

“Tell us your stories anyway,” Gaby pleaded. “Even if it’s all blown up and burned down, I like to hear how it used to be. It’ll pass the time while we wait for the scouts to come back.”

“So would sleep,” Rafe said.

“Ah, come on.”

I can’t bear to tell my fairy tale now, Madrone thought. I don’t believe it
anymore. But Gaby looked so eager and so young, almost innocent for a moment, like any child wanting a story. Reluctantly, Madrone began.

“In the North, water runs freely through the City in open streams, where ducks can bathe and kids swim and catch fish. Nobody owns anybody else, and everybody has enough to eat and drink.…”

The pink mansion was set among green lawns, surrounded by a high stone wall, electric fencing, and a security system worthy of an unpopular head of state. As raiders, Madrone considered, the Angels lacked the hillboys’ caution and finesse, but they made up for it with sheer nerve and complete ruthlessness. After word came back that a new Angel child had been purchased at Stebner’s, Rafe and Michael and Gaby and Madrone had hiked all night through the deserted streets, reaching the beach resorts just before dawn. They were out long after curfew, but Rafe simply shot any guard who challenged them. To disarm the alarm system, Michael tossed a live cat into the electric fence. As it screamed and spit and writhed in agony, one of the guards came out to turn off the system and remove it. As soon as it was disarmed, Rafe shot him.

“Wait here, till we call you,” Michael said. “If we don’t come out, get yourself back to the hills.”

She was only too happy to wait. They frightened her, almost as much as the soldiers and the Stewards. They killed so calmly, so coldly. All right, Madrone thought, huddling between the wall and a large evergreen, it’s true that I don’t want to see it. I’m a hypocrite. I want to save Poppy and I won’t challenge them on their violence, because how can I? Their violence saved my life. And look what’s been done to them—not that it condones murder but it does explain their lack of empathy. Still, if killing has to happen I prefer it to happen out of my sight, so I can pretend I have no part in it.

She heard a few shots, but mostly silence, and then Gaby gave a short whistle and called her name.

“Over the wall. It’s okay, now.”

Madrone hoisted herself up, the rough stones providing purchase for her hands and feet. She pulled herself over the top and leaped down, landing in a crouch.

“Come on,” Gaby said. Her face looked grim and Madrone began to be even more afraid.

The living room in the mansion was enormous, white-carpeted, lined with windows that overlooked the ocean, glinting pink and gold and rose as the early light glowed through the low fog. Rafe seemed almost lost in the expanse of luminous walls and low couches. He was bending over something, and looked up as Madrone entered.

“He’s yours, Madrone,” Rafe said.

At Rafe’s feet lay a man, trussed, naked, a gag tied tightly over his mouth, only his eyes looking out at her, terrified. He had shit with fear, and the stench mingled with the other smells in the room: blood and urine and vomit. Poppy’s broken body lay crumpled in a corner, like a discarded doll.

Madrone stood, shocked into silence, her eyes distracted by the changing panorama of light and water that played in the distance.

“He’s yours,” Rafe repeated.

“What do you mean, he’s mine?” Madrone asked.

“To kill,” Rafe said. “Take your time. Enjoy it.” He smiled, and Madrone suddenly remembered a kitten she’d had as a small child, who used to bring home gifts of half-dead mice, cocking her head with that same eagerness to please.

She wanted to vomit.

“No,” Madrone said. “Uh, thanks, but no. No, I don’t want to kill him.”

“Take a look at Poppy, what’s left of her,” Rafe said. “You’ll change your mind.”

I don’t want to look at her, Madrone thought, or I will be haunted for the rest of my life. But the room was full of Angel eyes, cold and blue, watching her. This is our life, they seemed to say. How can you heal us if you cannot bear to look at it?

She made herself kneel down beside the small body, touch the cold flesh. Blood streamed from Poppy’s nostrils and the torn flesh between her legs. There were other marks on her that Madrone’s eyes observed but her mind refused to comprehend. She was going to be sick. Something opened in her mind, like a cover sliding off a well, and she was tumbling down the years to stand above another broken, bloodied female body. No, she thought, this is what I don’t want to see, what I cannot remember and still go on living: my mother, after the men got through with her, and I crept out into the silence, and I saw. Kneeling, she gently touched Poppy’s cold skin, as she had touched her mother’s face, hopefully, but she didn’t move. She didn’t move.

She stuffed her fist into her mouth. Abruptly, she stood up.

“The nerves close to the surface of the skin are most sensitive,” Gaby said. “But of course you know that.”

No, Madrone wanted to scream, I know nothing about this. I know nothing about torture, nothing about death.

“We should get out of here within the hour, to be safe. That should be enough time to do it right.”

“Maybe you want one of the boys to rape him first?” Gaby suggested.

Madrone found herself nearly saying yes, just to buy time. The man was mewling behind his gag and shit was still leaking out his behind and she
couldn’t look at his eyes without wondering if her mother had looked like that. She could almost grab the knife, to close those eyes, to stop the spreading of this pain and the staining of this carpet. Oh, she wasn’t making sense and she had to think, think.

“You don’t understand,” she said. “I don’t want to kill him. I’ve never killed anybody.”

“It’s fun,” Rafe assured her. “You’ll get to like it.”

“No, I can’t. I can’t.”

I can’t shut it out, now. All these years I have held it down, because I didn’t want to remember her like that. I wanted to remember her face, and I can’t. I never could. Only now the blood, and the terrible cold stare of her eyes.

Rafe laughed.

“If you leave him alive, he’ll make more Poppies,” Gaby said. “He’ll identify you.”

Like Poppy’s eyes. Like this man’s burning, fearful eyes could be, in a moment. Glassy and blind, his skin that clammy cold. And it was only fair, because his eyes had seen, had watched as his hands … no, she couldn’t think about that.

“If it has to be done, you do it,” Madrone said. “But quick and clean. Don’t drag it out.”

“Why not?” Rafe asked. “That’s the fun part.”

“That’s what he did to Poppy,” Michael said. “Would you like me to describe exactly how she got those particular wounds?”

“No,” Madrone said quickly.

“She’d rather not know,” Rafe said, a note in his voice that scared her. “She’d rather keep her own hands clean. I know what you’re thinking—it’s what they all think. Leave it to the Angels; let them do the dirty work. They’re born with blood under their nails.”

But I know too much. It’s what I can’t unknow that is killing me. And I would like to hurt him. I would like him to pay for what he’s done. I’d like them all to pay, all the torturers and rapists and the death squads.
Diosa
, Coatlicue, shall I become an instrument of your justice and clean the world for you?

“You wanted this raid,” Gaby said.

I took the knife of the Reaper, but if I take up this knife and let the rage in me taste blood, what will I become? How will I ever come back?

Think, think, think! Use your mind, girl. Ground. Remember who you are, and who you want to be.

Madrone took a long, deep breath.

“Poppy’s dead,” she said. “Killing him won’t bring her back.”

“It’ll remove scum from a dirty world,” Michael said. “But if you don’t want to do it, maybe you’d like to watch me. I’m told that I’m good with my hands. Better with a knife.”

“I’m asking you not to,” Madrone said. She was fighting for breath, and her words came in gasps. “Not to torture him, not to spin out his death. Maybe it might be fun for you—maybe it might even be just—but that doesn’t make it right.”

“Don’t matter if it’s right,” Gaby said. “Don’t you want revenge?”

“I do,” Madrone admitted. “I could tear his heart out. Torture is too good for him. But that’s not what I’m thinking of. We become what we do. If we do these things, how do we become something better than what he is? How can we build something all together?”

“Who says the Angels are interested in building anything with a pack of rats and dried-up hillboys?” Rafe asked.

She was very afraid, now, afraid of the way they looked at her, eyes almost as glassy as those of the dead. She had betrayed them, judged them. They would not forgive her.

Am I just too cowardly to kill him? Too squeamish, like those who eat meat but refuse to wield the knife?

In the distance, a siren wailed.

“That’s it,” Gaby said. “We’re outa time.”

“Outa here, too,” Rafe said, plunging a knife into the man’s heart. They left as he gurgled, spouted blood, and died.

“Scatter,” Rafe called when they hit the street, and suddenly everyone around her was gone.

This is my punishment, Madrone thought, her heart pounding in panic. She knew none of their secret routes in and out of this district, no hiding holes, no places to disappear.

She had to get away, and fast. She had to get off this street, with its blankwalled estates where no one ever walked. Blindly, she turned and ran, away from the sound of sirens.

27

M
adrone forced herself to walk steadily, as if she had a perfect right to be where she was. All her senses were alert, her eyes flicked nervously back and forth. She had made her way quickly out of the affluent sectors, heading south and east to the rubble-filled streets of the flats and the floodplains, where the rising waters of the ocean poured through a gap in the broken dikes to drown streets and submerge buildings.

The afternoon sun was a dull sheen behind a bank of gray fog that sat heavily on the horizon. Around her the wreckage of tall buildings thrust spires out of the water. A few desperately poor people had staked out precarious homes in the upper floors of the submerged high rises. Coming and going by boat or on the labyrinth of half-rotted boardwalks, they survived until high tides or storms shifted the buildings’ foundations and they crumbled into burial mounds.

She had been on the run since morning, with nothing to eat, and she was beginning to tire. She needed a refuge. She needed food and sleep and somebody’s warm arms to harbor her and lull her and help her forget, or she needed time and safety in which to probe and release her memories.

Did you feel like this, Mama? Hunted? Afraid? Or did it all happen too quickly? Why can’t I ever feel a hint of your presence, as I feel Johanna, or Sandy sometimes? Where did you go?

Something shifted in the air around her, a subtle change as if for just a moment the pressure changed. A voice spoke to her, rough and male, in the slurred Spanish of Guadalupe. “
Cuida tus espaldas, hija.”
Watch your back, child.

Madrone’s bee-keen hearing picked up the scratchy, metallic sound of a com device behind her. Patrols. She was on a street leading straight to the main promenade along what passed for beachfront; ahead of her was nothing but water and the disintegrating piers that led out over the drowned lands. But she could not double back.

“Sigue tu rumbo.”
Keep walking. Don’t hesitate.

Who was this ancestor speaking to her? She strode out onto the promenade,
her footsteps echoing on the wooden boards. The water looked ominous to her. Johanna’s warnings echoed in her mind: “Don’t go in that water, you hear? You don’t know what’s in it.”

“¡Cuidado!”

Footsteps drummed behind her, ahead of her, reverberating like a drum tattoo. Another patrol, coming toward her. Trapped.

Now what do I do, whoever you are? Am I going to die now? Is that why the veil between the worlds is suddenly thin?